UK Hackers Sent To Jail After Stealing £600,000

In what could be considered as a caveat to online fraudsters, a UK court in a landmark ruling has sentenced a gang of cybercriminals to jail after they admitted of using sophisticated Trojans to steal login credentials of several bank customers to siphon a whopping £600,000 from their bank accounts.

Southwark Crown Court of London on Friday imposed prison sentences of around 4 and a half years on the four men found guilty of attempting to steal money from bank accounts to send it to countries in Eastern Europe and Russia.

IDG News Service is reporting that the offenders in question used a sophisticated Trojan, codenamed as “PSP2-BBB”, which executed the so-called “man-in-the-browser attack” to surreptitiously monitor victim’s web browsers, followed by transferring the stolen money to third-party accounts.

The Metropolitan Police noted that the ‘money mules’ subsequently accessed the funds and redirected them to various destinations in Eastern European and Russia via Western Union money transfer service.

The case illustrates first incidence of intensive collaboration between the financial sector and the Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), which was set up earlier this year by the UK government as a response to the criticisms that it wasn’t doing enough to put a check on cybercrime.